He puts an image on the screen of the site where Pat died, which very much upsets Marie. She says under her breath she hates that Pat has been reduced to a PowerPoint presentation. Her face and lips are white, and I worry about her sitting through the whole briefing.

Bailey points out illustrations of vehicles placed where he believes they were positioned during the shooting. The vehicles look like Tonka trucks and are not at all to scale.

“Why do you have drawings of vehicles?” I ask. “Why didn’t you position real vehicles there so things could be seen to scale?”

“Ma’am, we didn’t have the vehicles. It was too dangerous to use real vehicles.”

“How did you get there?” I ask. “Didn’t you have a vehicle?”

“I was flown in,” he says, and quickly changes the subject.

We are confused about the changes in the story. We don’t understand how, two weeks ago, Bailey was so sure that Baker was out of the vehicle, shooting a standing Afghan, and now he’s telling us that the shooters drove by without stopping and Bailey shot a prone AMF in the chest. Kevin looks dumbfounded and helpless. These are his superior officers, and he is suspicious that they are lying about his brother’s death. My brother asks Bailey how much time had elapsed from the time the AMF was shot to when Pat was killed. Nixon tells Mike they were shot simultaneously. He talks about how chaotic and confusing it was and compares the situation to the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. I look at him in disbelief.

“What about the lull in fire?” Mike says. “Lieutenant Colonel Bailey told us there was a lull. Pat wouldn’t come out from behind the rock while they were shooting.”

Bailey stares at my brother and says he was mistaken; there was not a lull in fire.

“But you said there was a lull in fire because the soldiers were reloading,” I remind him.

“I was mistaken, ma’am,” he says, looking at me as if to dare me to dispute his words.

“I still don’t understand why they didn’t see the purple smoke,” Patrick says.

“We thought the smoke was purple, but it was actually white. The soldiers thought the smoke was dust stirred up from bullets hitting the dirt.”

Again, we look at each other in disbelief.

“By the way,” Bailey says, “I suggested earlier that Pat may have released a flare, but we think it was actually Sergeant Weeks who did that.”

Reprinted from: “Boots on the Ground by Dusk” © 2008 by Mary Tillman with Narda Zacchino. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098.

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